Second day at the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction

With excuse for the late posting of this blog and with thanks to the Technical Assistance provided by Susan, herewith my experiences from the day of yesterday:

Today was our second day – but the First day of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction Platform. The day started late (10:00), but to compensate for that, we went on until almost 20:00 h.

What did the day bring? There was an official opening session, with a video message from Mr. Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and some opening remarks. It is very curious to find yourself in a huge meeting room – housing over a thousand persons – with representatives of some 120 governments, plus I don’t know how many UN agencies, NGOs and other organizations. A real circus worthy of the UN. All delegations (also of NGOs) had a spot reserved for them. It felt a bit awkward to be sitting there in a global meeting and being representing CARE International. Somehow, it makes you feel small in such a big meeting.

The next part on the agenda was the most boring part of the day. All delegations that felt like it (it must have been more than sixty) could make a statement of maximum 3 minutes. This was regulated by a traffic light. However, most of the delegations were so busy in reading from their papers that they were not aware of the traffic light and even a blinking “red” would not stop them from going about whatever they were intending to bring to the (mostly half asleep) public. Not surprisingly, when we got to 13:00 h and lunch break was there, we still had about 46 delegations to go. I feel happy that they get their say in a parallel meeting tomorrow – probably the only one listening to them will be themselves. So much for the UN system. I think I prefer our nicely disorganized NGO meetings.

Didn’t we do anything sensible at all today? Yes, of course we did. There were the side meetings at lunchtime, where I got to attend the session on “Catastrophic Risk Financing Tools and Products’. There, I learned about insurance and re-insurance systems that can reduce disaster risk in an economic sense at national level. Very interesting, although I doubt the direct interest for us as NGOs.

The afternoon brought us a “High level dialogue”, as it was called. Panelists (surely very “high level”) from around the globe gave us their insights on various aspects of DRR, in combination with Climate Change or otherwise, and the public (same plenary as in the morning session) could react, ask questions, etc. Not surprisingly, some delegation members took the opportunity to redo their morning speech. Others really asked question or made some sensible remarks. Anyway, at 18:15h the chair thought it was enough for the day.

For us, NGO people, it wasn’t, though. We needed to finish yesterday’s unfinished business. The largest part of the meeting was set aside for determining what key messages we want to bring to the different tables tomorrow, in order to have as much impact on the results of the meeting as possible. I must say that an hour or so of good-old NGO discussion makes quite a change from that UN talk. And results we got too! We came up with some four statements, which I cannot reproduce here because they are a bit vague to me still. We’ll get them on paper tomorrow morning, in time to be able to do our advocacy work.

Interesting day. The future will reveal if it was good enough as a lead into the next two days.

Paul Borsboom